MCB Hosts Its First Department-wide Retreat
By Kirsten Mickelwait
“It was a very successful experiment!” says Barbara Meyer, HHMI Investigator and Distinguished Professor of Genetics, Genomics, Evolution, and Development. She’s talking not about a new discovery in her lab, but about a recent gathering of faculty, staff, postdocs, and graduate students from across the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology. On September 26–28, 2025 MCB held its first department-wide retreat at the Asilomar conference center in Pacific Grove, California.
Although MCB has previously sponsored smaller retreats for individual divisions, the department leadership felt that offering a broader format would enable participants to learn about work outside of their immediate fields; to connect with new people who might become future collaborators, mentees, or mentors; and to make some new friends in the scientific community.
According to Meyer, she chaired the event “with the encouragement of MCB Department co-chairs Matt Welch and Greg Barton, the advice and hard work of retreat co-chair Ahmad Nabhan, and the helpful suggestions from other retreat organizing committee members Don Rio, Kathy Collins, Molly Ohainle, and James Olzmann. Staff members Shavecca Keels and Deby Johns played a masterful role in organizing the logistics of the retreat.”
In all, 266 participants attended the retreat, at which talks were presented by 34 different labs—including three new faculty hires, Phil Cleves, Tycho Mevissen, and Thomas Mann—and 137 posters presented by 46 labs. In all, 61 labs were represented.
“Especially when times are as challenging as they are now, it’s important to get together to celebrate one thing that unites us as a community, which is our passion for research and discovery,” says Welch. “There’s no better way to do this than to spend a few days learning about all the amazing science that’s being done within our department, and particularly by our outstanding students and postdocs.”
Meyer agrees. “Our department’s combination of labs is among the best in the world, and that was on full display,” she says. “The retreat enabled us to feel a real community spirit and to discover how scientific approaches and results from other labs can be applied to our own future research.”
Five participants were recognized for best talks: postdocs Abrar Abidi (Tjian/Darzaqc Lab), Lara Bushby (Martik Lab), and Leanna Owen (Drubin Lab); and graduate students Nate Dempsey (Park Lab) and Michael Young (Ohainle Lab).
And eight participants received recognition for best posters: postdocs Gabriel Cavin-Meza (Heald Lab), Megan Chong (Welch Lab), Danielle Garshott (Rapé Lab), and Chad Stein (Glaunsinger Lab); and graduate students Gabriela Diaz Figueroa (Brohawn Lab), Joey McKenna (Tjian/Darzacq Lab), María Torres-Colón (Swinburne Lab), and Kevin Williams (Bautista Lab).
“Having a department-wide retreat is valuable for the same reasons that having a large, interdisciplinary department is valuable—the opportunities to expand your horizons and to be challenged by new ideas,” says Connor Horton, a doctoral student in the Collins Lab. “In our first year as graduate students, we spend a lot of time with our cohorts and experience classes and rotations together, but after that, our experience is more fragmented as we transition to individual labs. This retreat allowed me to learn about what all my cohort-mates were up to scientifically and appreciate how much we've grown as scientists during our time as PhD students.”
The event was so successful that MCB plans to hold another department-wide retreat in the future, Meyer says, with the hope that it can include more time for communication and joint non-talk and non-poster activities. “The retreat also made us all realize how wonderful it would be to have a regular series of interdisciplinary talks on campus to showcase all the great science we do at MCB,” she says.
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